Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (10 page)

Initially, efforts to extradite the Meirings are a dismal failure. South African prosecutors fail ‘within a reasonable time’ to produce evidence to justify the extradition. The case is thrown out of court. The State launches a second extradition bid, but it will be seventeen long months before the end is in sight. On 18 May 1992, the US Department of the Interior and the USFWS issue a jubilant press release.

‘In a landmark action, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, in conjunction with the Justice Department and other Federal Agencies, has obtained the
extradition of an accused wildlife smuggler from South Africa, the first extradition ever from a foreign country on wildlife-related charges.

‘Meiring is alleged to have used his official position … in South West Africa to acquire and transport rhinoceros horns, automatic weapons, and hand grenades, and smuggle them into the United States …’

USFWS director, John Turner, says, ‘The extradition is a sure sign the world is becoming a riskier place for those who smuggle endangered species and other protected wildlife.’

Meiring is escorted aboard an aircraft at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and flown to the US. He is arraigned days later in a Hartford courtroom. He agrees to take a plea. In exchange, prosecutors won’t push for the extradition of his wife, Pat, who is still in South Africa with their two children.

On 20 May 1992, Meiring pleads guilty to a charge of falsifying US customs documentation and admits to shipping three AK-47s to the US in packages marked ‘wood carvings’ and ‘brass candlesticks’. The extradition treaty between South Africa and the US makes no provision for charges of smuggling as a prosecutable offence. Meiring is sentenced to eight months in prison. The judge gives credit to Meiring for time spent behind bars in South Africa and the US and, on 24 July 1992, he is released from prison and deported.

Moulton got to know him fairly well in the time he was in jail. ‘He was a very nice gentleman,’ he recalls years later. ‘He did it, but as I understand it, in those days the military was quite underpaid. Just before he went back he asked me, “Rick, can you get me out of the prison and take me shopping? My children still think I’m on military manoeuvres.” They were used to him going away for long periods of time and, whenever he went away, he’d bring back gifts for his kids.’ Moulton couldn’t allow it. Instead, he bought a few things out of his own pocket, including a Spider-man action figure, which he gave to Meiring.

‘He had tears in his eyes. He took those back with him for the kids. I felt really sorry for the children, because they had nothing to do with this whole thing.’

When they parted company, Meiring extended an invitation: ‘Rich, if you ever get to South Africa, find me and I’ll have you over for dinner.’ Moulton replied: ‘Yeah, probably, but I don’t think your wife would want me there.’

Lukman emerges from prison after nine months, supposedly a ‘changed man’. He starts a company called African Investments Ltd, which he claims ‘works on legitimate investments in Africa’. He tells journalist Edward R. Ricciuti: ‘I’m sorry for my past transgressions. I regret them terribly.’ Speaking to Steven Galster – at the time an investigator with the Washington-based sector of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) – Lukman claims that the smuggling was not an isolated incident. He says it formed a ‘major part of the covert war in Angola’ and involved ‘high-ranking South African officials’. And he makes the startling claim that ‘the biggest traffickers of rhino horn in the area were Americans operating out of Kamina’ – a reference to the abandoned Kamina Air Base in the then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where CIA operatives providing support for UNITA were stationed.

Lukman says a company called Southern Air Transport – once a CIA front company – regularly flew in and out of Kamina and Jamba carrying illicit cargoes of diamonds and rhino horn.

Lukman’s claims may have some credence. Acquired by the CIA in 1960 and later sold to an aviation lawyer who had worked for the agency, Southern Air Transport had documented links with arms shipments to Panama and the contras in Nicaragua. In September 1987, the
New York Times
revealed details of secret airlifts of arms and materiel to Angola’s UNITA rebels. The shipments had all been routed via Kamina.

Lukman vanishes into quiet obscurity and the case is quickly forgotten, consigned to collect dust in court and newspaper archives. Nothing further is heard of Meiring until May 2003, when a letter defending him is published on the website of the Australian newspaper
Green Left Weekly
. The writer identifies himself as Steve Thornton. He lives in Australia and describes himself as an ‘extremely close friend of the Meiring family’. Meiring is dead, he writes, killed in a motor-vehicle accident shortly after his return to South Africa.

‘He was a warm, compassionate and caring man … Marius was entrapped … Marius had obtained one rhino horn from a curio shop legally
and was not a “supplier” of parts from endangered species. Knowing that this item was illegal in the USA, Marius had the package labelled differently. A few AK-47s were also mailed to the USA. Anyone doing a thorough investigation into Marius’s affairs would realise that he could never have been a ringleader, nor play a major role in smuggling. His bank account would prove that.’

The true extent of Meiring’s involvement in the smuggling of weapons and rhino horn will probably never be known. But the case shone an uncomfortable spotlight on a hidden corner of the SADF’s war in Angola; one that the Defence Force was determined to keep secret.

*  Acknowledgement is given to the following articles, which, along with an extensive interview with Rich
Moulton, provided much of the basis for this chapter:
Ricciuti, Edward R. ‘Guns ’n Roses’.
Wildlife Conservation
95 (1), 1992
Galster, Steven R. ‘The trail leads to South Africa’.
The Nation
, 15 February 1993

January 1979

A twenty-three-year-old intelligence officer returns to base at Rundu in Namibia after an operation deep inside Angola. Des Burman is strung out and exhausted. A lieutenant in the SADF, he’s been working closely with elements of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement as a military advisor. He’s lost count of the number of ‘contacts’ he’s been in lately. Things move fast on the ground. Burman and his teams are perpetually on the run, pursued and shot at by Cuban gunships. By now, the ops follow a familiar pattern: Get in, find the enemy, kill them, and get out in a cloud of dust and a whirr of rotor blades.

The frequent deployments take their toll. Burman needs a new rifle. If you’re regularly dropped into combat by chopper, the solid stock of a standard-issue R1 is nothing but a hindrance. He’s looking for a rifle with a folding stock. He dumps his pack and heads for the stores. The warehouse is chock-a-block with army-green packing cases.

He opens one, then another, and another. He’s astonished by what he finds.

‘Every single case was packed with ivory and rhino horn and game skins, including sable, roan antelope, leopard skins and lion skins. Boxes and heaps and heaps and heaps of it. I blew a fuse. I lost it completely. Nobody was mentally normal at that stage, but in my case, that was basically the straw that broke the camel’s back.’

There must have been at least sixty crates, all labelled ‘dental equipment’ and marked for dispatch to Waterkloof Air Force Base near Pretoria.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Rundu is one of the SADF’s main forward-operating bases. The administrative capital of the Okavango region, it’s a large town by Namibian standards. Just to the north is the Okavango River and, across it, Angola.

When the Portuguese, who had colonised Angola for 400 years, hastily abandoned the country in 1975, conflict between the three main Angolan liberation movements – UNITA, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) – escalated into bloody civil strife. Angola’s tragedy lay in its riches – seemingly unlimited quantities of oil, diamonds and minerals. Everyone seemed to want a piece. In addition, the country formed part of the unhappy
cordon sanitaire
of buffer states that apartheid South Africa regarded as protection from ‘hostile black Africa’ and the ever-present threat of the communist
Rooi Gevaar
.

War turned Angola into a proxy battleground for the Cold War superpowers. Cuba and the Soviet Union threw their weight behind the MPLA. Along with Pretoria, Washington – in the guise of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s shadow warriors – threw its weight behind UNITA and the FNLA. By the war’s end, over 600 000 Angolans were dead and more than a million displaced.

Before the war, Rundu was a major trans-shipment point between Angola and Namibia. By 1979, the pont that once ferried cargo across the river is disabled and a chain with a no-entry sign bars the way to the access ramp. Sometimes at night, after bingeing on warm beer, callow South African
troepies
can be heard shouting insults at shadows across the river. ‘Castro is a cunt,’ is a particular favourite.

Rundu is a magnet for profiteers and smugglers. You can get anything, if you know the right people. Sometimes the only currency you need is cans of fish or what the soldiers call ‘
Owambo piele
’ (Owambo penises): horrid tins of Vienna sausages in brine.

Sector 20 HQ is where the army brass sit in their cushy offices, shuffling paper and sending young men out to kill and die. Many of the officers are little more than ‘civvies in uniform’. Somewhere along the line they get a degree and join the Defence Force. Before you know it, they have rank. They may have brains, but they are not fighters. Most never see battle, feel the fear, hear the screams, or smell the blood, rot and shit of the dead and dying.

Chief of Staff Intelligence, better known as CSI, has offices at the base in Rundu. They are at the pinnacle of wartime intelligence gathering, accountable directly to the chief of the Defence Force. In his current role, Burman reports to a CSI co-ordinator, Colonel Fred Oelschig. Oelschig’s brother, Mo, also a colonel, heads up the Rundu office of CSI’s Directorate of Special Tasks, which oversees logistical support to UNITA.

Burman storms out of the warehouse and heads for Fred Oelschig’s office. He’s apoplectic with rage. ‘I lost my cool so badly with that arsehole that they thought I was suffering from battle fatigue,’ he recalls thirty years later, his voice sharp with anger. ‘What pissed me off the most was that some of these guys were sitting in the backline earning a bloody lot of money and I was on the front line, getting shot at. They were running a flourishing pipeline of exploited products and pocketing the money.’

Oelschig, convinced that Burman is going to ‘hammer’ him, backs up against a wall behind his desk. ‘I’m going to take this to the press and expose the whole thing,’ Burman threatens.

Two weeks later, he is on a
flossie
– an air force Hercules – back to South Africa. They say he’s gone
bossies
, literally ‘bush mad’. For the next four or five months, Burman is assigned to a desk in a secret CSI building in Pretoria. It is the ‘seat of power in the intelligence sector’, but all he does is one mind-numbing army course after another. ‘Pathetic courses that meant jackshit to me … I felt like I was an animal in a cage being watched.’ When he is declared fit to return to combat, he is moved to a UNITA training camp in the Caprivi Strip, a narrow, 450-kilometre-long finger of land that extends from the northeastern corner of Namibia, thrusting eastwards between Angola and Botswana to the Zambian border. He never sees the warehouses or their contents again.